Remembering Wilson

by Cliopatria

Eighty-six years ago today was arguably the single most important speech in the history of American foreign policy: Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points Address. The basic principles it enunciated--self-determination, open diplomacy, freedom of the seas, free trade, disarmament--have remained the central tenets of American liberals and foreign policy ever since. And, as Wilson's own experience with the use of force to promote these goals demonstrated, articulating idealistic goals often is easier than accomplishing them.

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Oscar Chamberlain - 1/10/2005

My opinion of Wilson has followed a similar trajectory (except for my US high school teacher, Carol Hooper, who shocked us all by arguing that we should not have entered World War I.)

However, he's been coming back up a bit. For all his parochial and bigoted wrongheadedness, he understood that the international order needed new and strong institutions to have a prayer of avoiding future conflicts.

More strikingly, he understood that the United States had to be under such an order and not simply the creator of it for it to have legitimacy. (I would love to know more about how he came to that conclusion, or if he assumed that we would be the "first among equals.")

It's hard to remember but, in theory, The League of Nations was intended to by quite robust in deterring agression with force. Strong enough that the reasonably paranoid French would have accepted it as a substitute for a defensive alliance if the US had signed on.

David Lion Salmanson - 1/10/2005

The more I learn about Wilson the less I think of him. In high school he was part of the big 3: Roosevelt, Wilson, Roosevelt that created a wonderful Democratic (party) vision. In college, it was tragic hero. Nowadays I tend to see him as a segrgationist, anti-freedom, statist at home and a failure abroad. A terrible legacy for one of our few historian Presidents.